Student Geometry/Topology

Title: Genus two mutant knots

Date: 03/02/2017

Time: 3:00 PM - 3:50 PM

Place: C304 Wells Hall

Speaker: Wenzhao Chen, MSU

In this talk, I will give an introduction to the so called mutation operation of a 3-manifold, which can be described as cutting the 3-manifold along a given surface and then sew it back in a different way. In particular, this induces corresponding mutation operations on knots obtained by mutating the 3-sphere along a genus 2 surface in the knot complement. I will survey a few properties and conjectures regarding mutant knots.